Cramming in Cambodia – More from our man in Asia

Jason McBride was the P-I’s Olympia intern for the 2006 legislative session. Jason has traded committee hearings for the bustling markets and urban crush of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The recent University of Washington graduate is spending his summer in Cambodia, working as an intern for the Cambodia Daily, an English-language newspaper. He will be sharing his impressions of the country’s people and politics with Strange Bedfellows readers this summer. Jason can be contacted at: jasonmcb@msn.com
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By JASON McBRIDE

I’ve been traveling in Vietnam for about a week now, having finished my internship at the Cambodia Daily. The last story I wrote was on a high school girl whose entire community had been evicted from Phnom Penh in one of the munincipal government’s many “development projects.” The eviction threw off her studies, and when I met her, she was in the midst of taking
her graduation exams.

A well-off Phnom Penh family had taken her in so she didn’t have to prepare under the leaking roof of her family’s makeshift house; the municipality had dumped about 170 families into an empty field
without homes or facilities, including schools. And the transporation costs into the city each day for school are generally beyond the means of most evictees. So this girl, Srei Mom, considered herself one of the lucky ones, and when I last talked to her, she felt confident she had done well on her
exams. But there are thousands of families in similar circumstances without benefactors.

Another problem plaguing Cambodia is mass cheating. Some underpaid school employee, or employees, leak the answers to the high school graduation exams, and the night before the tests, there are lines out the door at all the photcopy shops in town. Kids who don’t have the money to pay for the answer sheets can bribe their proctors with a few dollars in order to consult each other during the test. Most people believe the answer to this problem is higher salaries for school employees. My understanding is that most teachers make about $30 a month, so taking bribes from students is probably a no-brainer.

A few words about Vietnam: Compared to Cambodia, hands down it is far better off. It’s clear that the government has invested much more in infrastructure and education. I’ve encountered far fewer young people who say they would like to go to college but cannot afford it. There is definitely a sense of confidence and optimism about the future you won’t find in Cambodia. I was told by an employee at my guesthouse in Saigon that there is a lot of cheating, but it’s clear that the country is not suffering so much for it as in Cambodia. I met a young man on the train from Hoi An to Hanoi who had taken an interest in Ronald Reagan’s economic policies and read a biography on him. Admittedly, I didn’t take a survey on the reading habits of people in both countries, but all it takes is a 30 minute ride around the streets of Hanoi or Saigon to see that they are much more worldly cities than Phnom Penh. The boutiques look as sharp and trendy as any you would see in the
West. Many of the buildings are freshly painted in self-consciously quirky pastels. Monstrous five-star hotels make me, the supposedly wealthy foreigner, feel like a pauper. And the abundance of French-pastry shops adds another touch of elegance you won’t find in Phnom Penh.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a special place in my heart for Cambodia. Undoubtedly my conclusions are somewhat self-serving, but I like the fact that Cambodians take so much interest in foreigners. They seem to be much more curious about us than the Vietnamese, and that’s probably because we
represent a better life to them. Cambodia is a desperately poor country with a government that does little more than ride the back of the nation and skim off as much as it can without being too, too flagrant (but a little flagrant is okay). In the past week, I have met one Vietnamese person who wants to go to the United States. But it seemed like every day in Cambodia I met someone who
envied my supposedly luxurious life in America. I think Vietnam’s pride in itself is the healthier attitude, and well-deserved, considering the years of war and destruction it has suffered. They have done well for themselves, and I think it has a bright future, economically as well as culturally.

That said, I want to relate one anecdote that contradicts everything I just said. There’s a hotel mafia in Saigon. The woman who runs the guesthouse I’m staying in now told me she had to hire a rival gang to keep them in check, otherwise she would have to pay them a commission on every guest she took in. In other words, it’s a protection racket. It was amazing to me that she
couldn’t go to the police, that she had to actually fight fire with fire. So Vietnam isn’t without its seediness. In both Saigon and Hanoi, I had many motor-taxi drivers offering me marijuana and “massage.”